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'Jobs, jobs, jobs. "
.
white faces, like satellite dishes with eyes.
'We do get those from time to time,
but they're rare," the taxidermist said.
Above his head hung a massive seagull
with its beak open, and next to him, on
a tabletop, lounged a pair of hedgehogs.
I've seen better variety, but there was
no denying that the man did beautiful
work. Nothing had crooked eyes or bits
of exposed plaster at the corners of its
mouth. If seen in a photo, you'd think
that these animals were alive, and had
gathered peacefully to boast about their
excellent health. The taxidermist and I
discussed the owls, and when my eyes
cut to a glass-doored cabinet with sev-
eral weather-beaten skulls inside it, he
asked if I was a doctor.
"Me?" For some reason I looked at
my hands. "Oh, goodness no."
"Then your interest in those skulls is
nonprofessional?"
" E tl "
xac y.
The taxidermist's eyes brightened,
and he led me to a human skeleton half-
hidden in the back of the room. 'Who
do you think this was?" he asked.
Being a layman, all I had to go by was
the height-between four and a half and
five feet tall. "Is it an adolescent?"
The taxidermist invited me to guess
again, but before I could he blurted, "It's
42 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 22, 2012
.
a Pygmy!" He then told me that in the
nineteenth century the English went to
what is now the Congo and hunted
these people, tracked them down and
shot them for sport.
Funny how quickly this changed
the mood. "But he could have died of a
heart attack, right?" I said. "I mean,
how are we to know for certain that he
was murdered?"
"0 h, we know, all right," the taxider-
mist told me. It would have been disturb-
ing to see the skeleton of a slain Pygmy
in a museum, but finding him in a shop,
for sale, raised certain questions, uncom-
fortable ones, like: How much is he?
"If you like the odd bits and pieces, I
think I've got something else you might
enjoy." The taxidermist retreated to the
area behind his desk, and pulled a plas-
tic bag off an overhead shelf. It was, I
noticed, from Waitrose, a grocery store
described to me upon my move to En-
gland as "a cut above." From the bag he
removed what looked like a platter with
an oblong glass dome over it. Inside was
a man's forearm, complete with little
hairs and a smudged tattoo. The taxi-
dermist said, completely unnecessarily,
"Now, therès a story behind this." For
what human limb in a Waitrose bag is
not without some sort of story?
He placed the platter on the table, and
as the lid was lifted and set to the side I
was told that, a hundred years ago, the
taxidermist's grandfather witnessed a bar
fight between two sailors. One was armed
with a sabre, and the other, apparently,
was disarmed with one. After it hap-
pened, the crowd went wild. The ampu-
tee fell on his back, and as he lay there in
shock, bleeding to death, the taxidermist's
grandfather looked down at the floor, at
the blood -soaked fingers which may have
still been twitching, and likely thought,
Well, it's not like it's doing him any good.
The story sounds a bit far-fetched, but
there was no denying that the arm was
real. The cut had been made two inches
south of the elbow, and the exposed end,
with its cleanly severed radius and ulna,
reminded me of osso bucco. "It was my
grandfather who mummified it," the
taxidermist said. "You can see it's not the
best job in the world, but it's really rather
good for a first attempt."
I leaned closer.
"Touch it," the taxidermist whispered.
As if I were under a spell, I did, shud-
dering a little at the feel of the hairs.
Equally creepy was the arm's color, which
was not Caucasian flesh tone but not
brown, either, the way most desiccated
body parts are. This was the same slightly
toasted shade as a spray-on tan.
"I think I'll just take one of those
owls," I said. "The one on the left, if
that's O.K."
The taxidermist nodded. Then he
reached to an even higher shelf and
brought down another plastic grocery
bag, this one from Tesco, which is de-
cidedly less upscale. "Now, a smell is
going to hit you when I open this up,
but don't worry," he said. "It's just the
smoke they used to preserve the head."
That's a phrase you don't hear too
often, so it took a moment for it to sink
in. When he opened the bag, I saw that
he might more accurately have said "the
head of this teen-age girl," for shèd been
no older than fourteen at the time of her
death. This sounds super grisly but is, I
propose, just medium grisly. The head
was four hundred years old, and came
from somewhere in South America-
Peru, I think he said. The skin was dry
and thin, like leather on an old worn-out
purse. Parts of it were eaten away, ex-
posing the skull beneath it, but what re-
ally struck me was her hair, which was